Easter Egg Maracas

This post is dedicated to my friend, Katie, who reminded me of this idea, since she is a musically-inclined momma too!

Plastic eggs can turn into great little shakers, and these are super easy to make.
Here's what we did to make our festive toys:

Gather some empty plastic eggs, a basket to put the finished ones in, some painter's or strong scotch tape, and things to fill eggs with (like dry beans, rice, pasta, pony beads, etc.). We used stickers to decorate these eggs. I chose to go temporary with these things since I'll need the eggs on Sunday for an egg hunt!

I thought I'd take this one more "musical" step forward by filling the eggs with different materials. Then, we could talk about the timbre (pronounced tamber... just in case you're not used to using that word...) and match sounds after putting them together.

So, we gathered random materials. K thoroughly enjoyed being put in charge of collecting the sticks.

 We used beans, rice, jingle bells, pennies, pom-poms, little sticks and little plastic CARS figures (which was very perplexing to K.. who wondered why on earth does mommy want me to put cars in eggs... She's lost it).

Next, the boys put some of each material into their eggs so we had two eggs of each.

A little messy, but not too bad....

Mommy taped the eggs closed and then the boys decorated them with stickers.

All the eggs were put in the basket and we each chose two whose sound we liked best (no one chose the pom pom ones... can't imagine why...) and sang "If you're happy and you know it, shake your eggs (SHAKE, SHAKE, SHAKE).... Then we switched to the other person's eggs and sang again.

J was ready to be done by now, so K and I moved on to identifying same sounds.
I made a list of each material and he had to check it off as he found the match.

We also talked about each sound as each egg was shaken.

He did great and identified them all easily. Guess I'll need to move on to something more challenging next time...

Have you made your egg shakers yet this season??
Have fun!